Sonus Networks, Inc., a market leader in next generation IP-based network solutions, today announced enhancements to its ASX VoIP platform to triple its effective capacity, increase geographic resiliency and extend support for next generation voice over broadband, cable, 4G/WiMAX networks, as well as legacy last mile CLASS 5 deployments. Sonus ASX is a market-leading solution for IP-based subscriber features, supporting both consumer and business segments, with deployments of millions of subscri

Despite a loss of nearly a quarter-million jobs in 2009, the high-tech industry fared better than the overall U.S. job market. That's the finding of TechAmerica Foundation's newly-released report, Cyberstates 2010: The Definitive State-by-State Analysis of the U.S. High-Tech Industry. The report is the group's 13th annual report that identifies national and state trends in high-tech employment, wages and other economic factors.

Since the advent of controller-based WLAN systems, I've bemoaned the hefty price-tag and complexity that comes with another layer of network hardware. It was a big jump going from access points that could think for themselves to models that needed to get their smarts from a mothership residing elsewhere on the network. But a middle-ground market is emerging around a number of vendors including BlueSocket, Meraki and AeroHive. We tested BlueSocket's vWLAN 2.0 to see if it can provide a feature-ri

I sat down and said, with a grin, "Infiniband is dead." Asaf Somekh VP of marketing and Christy Lynch, director of corporate communications for Voltaire, took the shot well, but my comment framed the conversation in a way that was useful. Over the last few days at Interop, the differentiator--the long term differentiator--in Ethernet switching is not going to be speeds and feeds. Network performance will always improve, sometimes in baby steps, sometimes in leaps. The differentiator is services,

SonicWALL, Inc., a leading secure network infrastructure company, announced April 27 at Interop the availability of its SonicWALL Email Security Virtual Appliance, providing one more deployment option for its powerful, easy-to-manage and highly scalable email security and anti-spam solutions. SonicWALL customers now have multiple options when it comes to deploying email security, including SonicWALL Email Security (SES) Appliances, server software deployed on a third-party Windows based server,

InformationWeek Analytics, the leading service for peer-based IT research and analysis, and Interop, the leading global business technology event series, today named Arista Networks as the Grand Prize Winner of the 2010 Best of Interop Awards following the keynote presentations at Interop Las Vegas 2010. Also selected were Best of Interop winners in nine categories, including IBM, Vidyo Inc., Mellanox Technologies, Arista Networks, ExtraHop Networks, Spirent Communications, TippingPoint, Citrix

Emulex Corporation today announced that it is partnering with leading 10Gb/s Ethernet companies to develop joint solutions that help customers make the transition from 1Gb/s Ethernet to 10Gb/s Ethernet, so they can reap the benefits of network consolidation and convergence. Emulex and its expanded partner ecosystem, including Arista Networks, BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE), Extreme Networks, Force10 Networks, Ixia, Juniper Networks and Voltaire, are collaborating to solve the challenges inhe

With the $7 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems now completed, Oracle has to watch over more than 13,000 network devices and services--everything from access switches, core network routers, wide-area-network (WAN) routers, firewalls, load balancers and more--and it takes a comprehensive network management system. But what used to be an unwieldy patchwork of various network monitoring and management tools, some purchased, some open-source and some home-grown, has been whittled down to one: an

As mentioned in my previous blog, since we can't make all of the sessions ourselves, we have some reps out there doing the legwork for us, and we have a round-up from the yesterday's sessions by Jay Sumresh Bhansali, Ashutosh Tusharbhai Bhatt, Paridhi Nadarajan and Benson Mathews Poikayil.

Since I'm scheduled to speak about I/O virtualization here at Interop on Wed, I spent Tuesday morning tracking down new IOV and converged networking stories and products. In no small part so I could avoid looking like an idiot by describing last month's technology as cutting edge while someone from the audience shouted that a new vendor on the floor was had even better vaporware.

There's a lot of news coming out of Interop this week. Here are highlights of a few interesting announcements. The first comes from Gale Technologies. The company announced its GaleForce software on Tuesday. GaleForce is orchestration software that lets enterprises and service providers build templates of virtual and physical servers, application software, network resources and storage. Business units can then choose from among these templates to quickly access and deploy software and hardware

AirHop Communications, the leader in software enabling the next wave of the mobile internet, today announced that it has become a member of the eNsemble Multi-Core Alliance, a premier industry organization founded to drive best-in-class innovations in multi-core parallel processing platforms and software development. Supported by a broad base of world-class hardware and software providers, the eNsemble Multi-Core Alliance serves as the foundation upon which original equipment manufacturers (OEMs

Interop is like a box of chocolates and my chocolates are filled with nuts. I spend the better part of my day talking with vendors about their product plans and what I see happening in IT and the market. My view doesn't always jibe with what they see in the market. Whether it's Cisco who still hasn't deployed NAC too deeply, HP who is crowing about their all HP data center, or F5 who was also bitten by McAfees dat file debacle last week, It's also good to remember that these companies are themse

The original purpose behind TCP was to provide reliable transmission over the IP protocol through a set of checks and retransmissions until the data was guaranteed to have arrived. However, in today's more reliable networks, this belt-and-suspenders method can result in slower transmission time. That's the theory behind Internap Network Services' Accelerated IP Internet traffic accelerator service, (XIP), which the Atlanta company claims can improve performance of enterprise web applications by

Ixia, a leading, global provider of converged IP network test solutions, today announced that they will partner with Cisco and Emulex to demonstrate a proof-of-concept data center carrying combined network and storage traffic between server-assets across a converged data center infrastructure under high traffic loads. The demonstration, taking place at Interop Las Vegas, booth #1359, will be using a combination of Ixia, Cisco, and Emulex equipment.

Spectrum Inc., a national telecom lifecycle management (TLM) company, unveiled the latest chronicle of its award-winning B2B software, TrueVue. Version 4.0 was released today and includes a multitude of enhancements that are engineered to improve the end users' functionality when managing wireless and wireline services

Arbor Networks, whose technology detects abnormal network traffic flow, now offers its PeakFlow monitoring tool for use in virtualized environments. PeakFlow X Virtual 4.2 is the alternative to PeakFlow X software that monitors packet flow through network routers and switches, alerting system administrators if traffic spikes above normal patterns, such as in the case of a dedicated denial of service (DDOS) attack. The virtual version of the software is designed to run in VMware's ESX and ESXi hy

Napatech has announced an upgrade to its existing network adapter product, the NT20E2. It uses the PCI-Express Gen 2 bus, and it can provide twice as much bandwidth: 25 Gbps compared with the previous generation's 12.5 Gpbs. In addition, the new adapter family is low profile, fitting in half-height slots in the server, whereas the existing product requires a full-height slot. As networks get faster, it can become more difficult to perform intrusion detection on every data packet without interfer

Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), today announced that its NetX Duo dual IPv4/IPv6 TCP/IP stack has successfully passed rigorous IPv6-Ready Logo testing. The IPv6 Forum, a world-wide consortium focused on providing technical guidance for the deployment of IPv6, does not allow companies to post the IPv6 Ready Logo until conformance and interoperability testing is complete in order to increase user confidence by demonstrating that IPv6 is

John McCool, general manager of Cisco's Data Center group, talks about the networking powerhouse's Unified Computing System strategy as well as the increasing enterprise impact of virtualization and video.

Gigamon, whose switches replicate data and distribute it to various network monitoring tools, now offers the Giga VUE-212, with a price targeted at SMEs. It features both 10Gbps and 1Gbps ports to divert replicated portions of network traffic to monitoring tools with specific functions, such as performance monitoring, intrusion detection or protocol analysis. While similar to Gigamon's Giga VUE-2404 and VUE-420, the 212 has a starting price of $12,995.

VM6 VMex is changing the face of virtualization much like desktop software application suites did for that market back in the 80s. The software provides a virtualization suite based on Hyper-V that offers virtual, shared storage, advanced clustering, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and virtual machine management. As with application suites, VM6 is offering something that can't found with the individual components: simplicity. With VM6, small- to-medium businesses (SMBs) gain an all in-one I

We caught up with Jim Metzler who is the track chair of both the Networking track chair at Interop. He is also track chair for Application Delivery 2.0, as well. A lot is changing in Ethernet beyond "just faster," such as new standards for multi-pathing Ethernet and doing away with spanning tree, lossless Ethernet and better flow control. All of these feature will impact how you design networks.

Extreme Networks has taken another step in articulating its data center vision with two new announcements to their data center product line. The first addresses applying policies to network traffic to and from the VM, and having those policies follow the VM during moves and disaster recovery events. The second is Extreme's stake in the ground supporting hypervisor switch by-pass that allows the hardware switch to move frames from VM to VM. Both announcements address architecture design requireme

FiberTower Corporation and MetroPCS Communications, Inc., announced today that they have entered into an agreement for FiberTower to provide Ethernet-based backhaul services in select MetroPCS markets. The evolution to Ethernet for network backhaul helps prepare MetroPCS for its 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network launch that is planned during the second half of 2010.

If you don't have hands-on experience, you might find it difficult to sort out what infrastructure will most effect your server virtualization deployment because even printer ink suppliers are claiming to make your virtual environment work better. But there are some products that, with tighter integration, can make a big difference. Best-in-class load balancing systems from Cisco, Coyote Point and F5 are great examples.

SonicWALL, Inc., a leading secure network infrastructure company, and Autotask Corporation, developer of the world's number one, fully-hosted IT business management platform, announced today the immediate availability of several seamless integration options for their respective products.

Savvis, Inc., a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, today announced it will be providing enhanced latency and connectivity monitoring capabilities for its financial services clients across the globe.

We caught up with Jim Metzler to discuss his plans for the Interop Application Delivery 2.0 track. Application delivery has always been important, but new demands are being made on IT to delivery applications to user where ever they are on what ever device they are using. Users are getting spoiled by ubiquitous bandwidth and more powerful computing devices like netbooks and PDA's. Getting the app to the user efficiently and securely is a challenge. Where that application resides such as a data c

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) today announced its plans to offer a unified compute platform made up of HDS servers and storage, as well as HDS-developed orchestration software to simplify the provisioning of resources for business units. HDS joins Cisco Systems, IBM, Dell and HP in offering prepackaged bundles of server, storage and networking elements. Unified computing aims to consolidate the hardware components in a data center to reduce operational costs and speed deployment of services. HDS's

Arista's new 7500 is a high-capacity, high-speed switch that the company is targeting a as a data center interconnect. Unlike the Campus LAN where Cisco commands a large percentage of the ports, the data center network is much more in play. Many networking vendors are promoting a flattening, but doing so requires a capacity switch in the center that can handle the total load gracefully. The Arista 7500 certainly fills that requirement. The biggest problem you may have is running 384 cables to t

HP today introduced a comprehensive edge-to-core networking portfolio that delivers a superior alternative to the marketplace in terms of technology, energy efficiency and total cost of ownership. The new HP Networking portfolio combines the best of HP ProCurve and 3Com to provide an advanced network fabric that is up to twice as fast with half the energy use, and at a 65 percent lower total cost of ownership.

A decade ago, organizations went through a massive overhaul of their IT infrastructure in an effort to prevent the massive outages anticipated with Y2K. Now they need to decide whether a similar investment will be needed again. Publicly routable IPv4 address allocations are going to reach exhaustion in the next two years, if the projections from the Number Resource Organization (NRO) are to be believed. Soon after that, finding IPv4 addressing won't be easy. Carriers have been gradually preparin

Voltaire has added Ethernet switch management to the Infiniband fabric management product, Unified Fabric Manager (UFM). UFM provides the management functions to provision the switching fabric from port to port and manage congestion within the fabric. In addition, UFM provides reporting and prediction tools to determine where bottleneck occur and manages capacity before it becomes a problem. Voltaire also integrated UFM with third party products like Blade Networks G8124 and Procurve's 6600-24XG

InformationWeek Analytics, the leading service for peer-based IT research and analysis, and Interop, the leading global business technology event series, today announced the addition of six analyst led content sessions to the Interop educational agenda. The sessions will take place on Thursday, April 29th at Interop Las Vegas.

As enterprises look to cut their costs, Vyatta's introduction version 6.0 of its open source routing code last week again raises the question as to what extent IT organizations can and should trust open source code in their network operations. Within the networking world, however, open source routers have made nominal in roads into enterprise markets. There are different reasons for the lack of adoption, mostly reflecting that routing is less about features and cost within businesses today and m

Downtrodden would be an apt way to describe small and medium businesses during the recent economic downturn. However, hope is emerging: a Spiceworks survey found that these companies plan to increase their IT spending by nine percent this year, compared to a measly one percent jump in 2009.

The theory is that cloud services can save on the bottom line. Apptio's upgrade of its Technology Business Management (TBM) platform lets organizations test that theory. The software platform allows IT to compare the total cost and quality of private and public cloud services by answering questions such as "What services are being consumed?" "How can I increase my utilization rates and lower costs?" and "Should I use cloud?" In short, IT can put a number on the savings from purchasing a cloud

Network security company Symantec has introduced four new software suites that address compliance management, data loss prevention, system management and infrastructure management to stop targeted attacks, which as opposed to a mass attack, are methodical and well-focused attacks on a particular network or networks, said David Dorosin, director of product marketing for Symantec.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 13, Nimsoft, a business unit of CA, Inc. today announced availability of Nimsoft On Demand, a Software as a Service (SaaS) Unified Monitoring solution that delivers the robust capabilities and benefits of IT monitoring as an on-demand solution. With Nimsoft On Demand, emerging enterprises and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can maintain visibility into their business-critical IT infrastructure--including both their internal assets and those in the cloud--without havi

Mellanox Technologies has announced its second generation of InfiniBand switches and FabricIT chassis management software to support a wider range of users. The company had said in mid-2009 that it intended to do a family of switches, as well as a cabling solution, which it also announced. Mellanox, based in Yokneam, Israel, now offers IS5000 20 and 40Gbs switches ranging from 36 to 648 ports.

Getting maximum performance from an MPLS network that is managed by the carrier and delivered via an Ethernet hand-off can be a challenge for your network if you don't take some additional steps to utilize it effectively. We see performance issues in these topologies on a regular basis. Think about this: how do you know if you are dropping traffic or your traffic is being slowed down considerably in some virtually bottomless queue across the MPLS cloud? Hopefully, your only feedback mechanism is

Our latest survey shows growing demand, fixed budgets, and good reason why resellers and vendors must fight to remain relevant. One thing's for sure: The data center is poised for a wild ride, and no one wants to be left behind.